Susan Olsen

            On Friday morning my left arm was a lot more sore than it’s been in the last few days. I was still able to lean on it with my right arm and leg raised though. 

            I worked out the chords for most of the third verse of “L'année à lenvers” (The Year in Reverse) by Boris Vian. I think after the third verse the chord pattern will repeat. 

            I ran through singing and playing my alternative translation of “Notre Derniere Chance” (Our Final Chance) by Serge Gainsbourg that uses the names of well known mostly English language newspapers and magazines. Then I started collecting photographs of images from the song to use in a photo montage video that I’ll post on YouTube and then on my blog. Searches are flooded with AI images now but I tried to find real ones. 

            I played my Kramer electric during song practice for the last of two sessions and it stayed in tune the whole time. Tomorrow I’ll begin a two session stretch of playing my Martin acoustic. 

            I weighed 87.35 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I brought the stepladder in and washed the ceiling and the upper walls. I found a couple of spots where I had neglected to sand the drywall compound. I tried to do it then but it doesn’t work as well when it’s wet. I’ll probably finish washing the walls on Sunday. 

            I went over to the Salvation Army thrift store to look for a mirror to replace the one that broke last night but they didn’t have any round ones. 

            I weighed 87 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I rode up Lansdowne to Bloor so I could check out a couple of thrift stores in the area. They didn’t have any round mirrors at the Sally Ann. I checked out Ransack the Universe and what a great store! Jessie didn’t have the kind of mirror I wanted on hand but said he has hundreds of mirrors in storage and so he took my email so he could contact me if he found one. I rode downtown and on the way back stopped at a couple of places at Queen and Bathurst but they didn’t have round mirrors either. When I got back to Parkdale I thought I’d stop at The Public Butter where the guy had a round mirror slightly bigger than the one that broke. I got it for $5 and change. It has a cracked frame but I think that can be fixed with construction glue. The frame is somewhat ornate with a line of four roses in relief at each corner. I’m not going to mount it until after I’ve painted the bathroom because it’s the removing and remounting of the other mirror during my sanding, filling, sanding, filling and sanding that caused the Velcro strips to fail. In the meantime I’ve mounted the largest piece of the broken mirror on the wall and I can use that until the painting is done and I repair the mirror frame. Once I mount it I don’t want to remove it again. 

            I weighed 86.55 kilos at 18:30, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since July 31. 

            I was caught up with my journal at 19:21. 

            I worked on the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Paranoiac Utopia”. The concert video continues to drag behind the studio audio and so every few words I have to delete some of it to bring it forward. In the second chorus I managed to synchronize the concert video with the studio audio for “Amidst all this blindness I feel I can see forever. Midst this”, “blindness”, “I feel I can”, “see”, and “forever”. That marks the end of the second chorus. There are two verses and one more longer chorus left. 

            In my “2024-09-30 Song Practice” Movie Maker project I deleted a little bit of the audio to bring it in sync with the video. But then I could hear that they were out of line and so I undid my changes. It turns out they were in sync since yesterday. I deleted all the songs that came before” my Gibson performance of “How to Say Goodbye to You” but still needed to shave off a little more when it was time to stop for supper. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a chicken leg while watching episode 3 of The Brady Bunch.

            Cindy has been cast in the lead role as the Fairy Princess in the school play. The whole family is looking forward to cheering her on. But then she learns that because there are so many performers in a small auditorium, each actor can only bring one parent. Having to choose makes Cindy confused and unhappy until she decides to quit the play. Finally Mike steps in and tells her he can’t make it and so it’s a load off her mind. In the end a special performance of the play is given the night after the main play so that all the Bradys can attend. That seems silly since all the other actors would have had to perform without one parent as well, so why the special treatment for the Bradys? 

            Cindy was played by Susan Olsen, whose TV debut was on Ironside. Her film debut was in the Elvis movie The Trouble With Girls”. She had surgery later on the correct the adorable lisp she had as Cindy Brady. She became a graphic designer and illustrated children’s books. She made a satirical coffee table book about the Brady Bunch Variety Show, which is considered to be one of the worst shows of all time. She’s a spokesperson for migraine awareness. She was co-host of a radio show called “Two Chicks Talking Politics” but was fired for making homophobic comments. She says she wasn’t fired.